Uwe Boll's House of the Dead remains the most incompetent film to get a major release. Yes, even after House at the End of the Street. It's not the worst movie ever made, nor is it the most unpleasant time I've ever had watching a movie. It's just put together with alarmingly little skill or regard for anyone who might be trying to follow its basic continuity. I wrote a review of the theatrical version in 2004:
Strange how bad House of the Dead is, for a major studio horror film. There have been worse films made by better filmmakers, but usually this kind of cinematic incompetence is reserved for ultra-low-budget straight-to-video territory. It’s based on a video game, which is warning sign number one. Its director, Uwe Boll, has come out and admitted that the movie is pretty bad, claiming, "You can’t make a good movie from a bad script."Now comes the Director's Cut, or as it's labeled on the DVD case, "Funny Version." Boll, who realizes that he made a bad film but hasn't yet conceded that it's at least partially his fault, has recut his disappointing zombie film as a wacky comedy. At first glance this doesn't sound like a bad idea: Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily?, which was a redubbed Japanese spy film, is one of the most consistently hilarious films ever made. But Boll seems to have no sense of humor. Every gag he inserts into his film is either a juvenile joke or a puerile jab at someone else. Yes, the writing was bad and some of the acting was bad. But the film was also poorly directed, and Boll can't escape that.
Well, actually, yes, you can, but that’s a whole other story. Either way, the script is the least of this movie’s problems. Boll has no understanding of how a horror movie works, though he appears to have seen many. He knows the notes but not the music.
Boll has also claimed that the movie is very faithful to the video game. I believe the game’s plot is something like the plot of Resident Evil: a group of government agents are sent into a house that is overrun by zombies. The movie is about a bunch of doofus college kids who travel to an island for a rave, only to find it overrun by zombies. Maybe Boll was referring to the little clips from the video game that he inserted into the film. He also films a death by having the camera circle a character before fading to red. You know, Woody Allen says he owes his filmmaking style to Ingmar Bergman; I think it’s the same with Uwe Boll and “Quake II.”
Once the kids meet the zombies, things progress rather like a video game would. Zombies jump out of the darkness, the kids shoot them. The kids are conveniently provided with guns by a grizzled but friendly arms dealer/fisherman named Captain Kirk (Jürgen Prochnow). The forced “Star Trek” reference isn’t funny, but I did laugh when one character referred to him as “the U-boat captain.” His creepy first mate is played by another old reliable, Clint Howard, who strongly advises against traveling to the “Isla del Morte,” for so the island is named. “Morte!” he admonishes. “That’s Spanish for dead!” Actually, it’s Italian for dead, but why argue?
Now, there is a special place in my heart for zombies that lurch around and bite people. In this movie, they lurch, they run, they do long-jumps, they swim, and they spit acid. Or at least one of them does. They’re led by a scar-faced hooded zombie (David Palffy) who, I guess, started the whole zombie plague. When one character asks him why he wanted to become immortal, the answer is so obvious that I am amazed I didn’t think of it myself.
But the action is so misguided that it’s hard to maintain interest. There’s one extended fight sequence between humans and zombies that’s so jumpy that I don’t believe there was any plan for it at all. It looks like the director supplied insufficient footage for the editor, who had to fill in the gaps with odd 360-degree image rotations and scenes from the video game.
The actors do more or less a passable job with their excuses for characters. All attempts at development seem to have been added after the fact. One character doesn’t stop to mourn her best friend’s death until twenty minutes after it happens; by then, we’d already forgotten. Ona Grauer is impressive as the female lead; she may one day be able to headline an action film. Will Sanderson, as the goofy best friend, is actually pretty funny. And God help him, Prochnow does what he can as the old sea salt.
House of the Dead is a failure, but it’s such a bizarre failure that it pretty much merits a viewing anyway. It’s more than just your average video-game-turned movie. It is incompetent, but it’s more fun to watch than some actual good movies. It is, unintentionally, sillier than any zombie movie ever made, and that includes Return of the Living Dead II.
The main motif seems to have been to intersperse the film with "Pop-up Video"-style commentary that pops up occasionally in dialogue balloons. The quality of this humor reaches about this level:
When Jurgen Prochnow appears: "Hey, isn't that the guy from Das Boot?"
When characters make questionable horror movie decisions: "Do you buy this?"
During a zombie fight scene: "Anyone feel like dancing?"
When entering a spooky house: "OK, where is Igor hiding?"A surprising number of commentary balloons are made up of potshots at the actors, who are doing the best they can under the circumstances. Will Sanderson, oddly enough, seems to take most of the abuse, which is odd since he's not only pretty good in the movie, but by all accounts is a friend of the director. With friends like these...
In addition to the commentary, Boll also inserts fart noises, rimshots after bad comic dialogue, and ADR with different dialogue to make the scenes "funny." One scene is dubbed over so it sounds like a zombie is ordering a cappuccino (ho, ho). A "Man O Meter" occasionally appears when a character is emasculated. There are also repeated outtakes in which a dubbed-in Boll abusively screams at his actors. Is he kidding his image? Maybe, but he kids a lot of his collaborators on the way there: the majority of his inserted gags are targeted at "bad acting" and "bad writing," but never "bad directing."
There's no shame in trying to kid your mistakes, but House of the Dead would have been best left on its own. Although Boll has been called a modern-day Ed Wood, the comparison is unfair to Wood. Wood at least cared about making films, and never tried to distance himself from his failures. He truly loved his work. Boll would rather throw everyone else under the bus and pretend he had nothing to do with it.
As bad as House of the Dead was, I'd infinitely recommend it over House of the Dead: Funny Version. The original is at least a pure and honest disaster, and a whole lot funnier.
House of the Dead: ** out of ****
House of the Dead: Director's Cut: 1/2 out of ****
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